Maria Garcia
Patrícia Silvestri is a psychologist with a master’s and doctorate in clinical psychology. She treats refugees from the perspective of Attachment to Place in a transitional environment and in the light of Environmental Psychology.
She details clinical psychology’s understanding of climate anxiety and the approaches and treatments for patients suffering from climate change disorder, whether due to eco-anxiety or trauma resulting from extreme weather events.
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How does psychology understand climate anxiety? Is it an object of clinical concern or a mere expression of common sense in the face of the collective vision of a “climate collapse”?
Yes, climate anxiety exists in psychology. It is related to anguish or generalized fear of the consequences of climate change. It is not a disease or pathology, but rather an emotional response manifested by stress, insomnia, panic attacks and burnout.
We’ve been hearing certain terms more frequently since the COVID-19 pandemic. Insomnia and the feeling of powerlessness can bring traces of depression. Not that anxiety leads to depression, but it can bring depressive traits. Then the person feels paralyzed, nothing they do is enough.
Meanwhile, young people are much more connected to climate issues and behavior. They start to ask: “What can I do to make the climate better?” and they are closer to everyday issues that were not a concern 30 years ago.
Are people bringing their environmental anxieties into therapy more?
Yes, they are. However, not because of the environmental concern itself, but because of the symptoms. Environmental psychology emerged more strongly in the 1980s and 1990s, with this concern for the environmental context and the person’s interrelationships with the environment.
The way the person reacts and interacts with the environment, both physical and emotional, and how they evaluate and perceive this environment, are important for the clinical psychologist to diagnose and refer the case. This is a growing area of psychology and there have been several studies, in partnership with geographers and architects, that address the issue of the environment and how it impacts on people’s lives: the colors, the presence of plants, whether there is a window or whether it is lit, etc.
How can all these mental health crises be linked to the environment and what strategies can be used?
Climate change opens up an axis linked to health. There’s the issue of atmospheric change, for example. When you go to a place where you feel the lack of air from fires, rising sea levels, temperatures or phenomena such as droughts and floods, all this has an impact on the individual.
In the case of Rio Grande do Sul [an extreme weather event that occurred in 2024, with record flooding in the state that led to the displacement of more than 700,000 people], these people lost everything: their homes, their reference points.
Faced with this, they will use resilience, values and repertoires to get through this difficult time. There are some symptoms that the psychologist has to be aware of in clinical treatment, such as irritability, stress or insomnia.
The person complains that they are not sleeping properly, that they are very irritable or that they have no patience when dealing with people, and that they have mood swings and low motivation. These are symptoms that arise in the complaint within the clinical experience and it is up to the psychologist to investigate each one. And always working with a multidisciplinary team to determine the best treatment, the best approach for this person in the office.
From the point of view of research in environmental psychology, should anxiety about climate collapse be studied individually, with individual solutions for the patient, or from a more collective perspective?
It can be individual or collective. We treat the issues that mobilize this person. For example, if they have anxiety that is not pathological, in which they start from a fear of suffering an environmental cataclysm that is going to end the world, how do they stand within this context? And this anxiety doesn’t affect everyone in the same way.
When you talk about environmental anxiety, you mean fear of the future. This is something you have no control over and it paralyzes you. Collective anxiety, on the other hand, has to do with how we interact with the environment, how I perceive that environment, how I store information about those places and those sensations that pass through the senses.
What psychological aspects can people go through when they perceive climate change in the territory where they live, but have no intention of leaving? What do you, in your practice and study, understand as “attachment to home”?
Attachment to place has to do with the marks we make on that place and its meaning. If I go to a new place, for example, and I bring the family picture frame, I’m bringing an object to mark that space. That’s what we call brands. And what would be the meaning of this family photo in this new environment I’m building?
The role of the clinical psychologist in these situations is to act in treatment, through individual and group support, to promote resilience – which is a response to adaptation. So how do I adapt to this new place or this changing place? What coping strategies will I use?
Education and awareness are key elements, with more sustainable practices, such as lectures at universities or schools. Education along these lines has been taking place with greater emphasis in recent years. Psychologists can also work with environmental education programs and psychological support to adapt to and reduce these impacts, through interventions, conversation circles, individual care, to minimize and reduce these negative impacts and stimulate environmental activism.
I think it’s important to sleep well, to do physical activity, because this has an impact on endorphin changes in the body and makes you feel better. And it also helps them to understand their interaction with the environment.
So environmental activism is a strategy that can work to deal with anxiety?
Yes, working with public policies and awareness programs. I believe these are important actions to minimize these issues of environmental impact on climate anxiety.
We have several studies that talk, for example, about people who live in homes that are more organized and cleaner, and this encourages colleagues and friends to maintain this organization and cleanliness of the environment. Everyone has to do their bit. If we think that nobody does anything, we’ll never get anywhere, right?
The WHO (World Health Organization) talks about these issues of how small actions, even if they seem small, have an impact on generations in the long term. And I think that’s what education in schools is all about. Up until 25 or 30 years ago, nobody sorted their garbage. Now, selective collection is becoming more and more common. It’s a small job, but that small ant can get there.